Beyza Jacobsson Professor

My teaching through the years has focused primarily on English for Specific/Academic Purposes (ESP/EAP), especially scientific writing for international publication for post-graduate students and researchers from a wide range of disciplines within and outside Stockholm University. At the English Department, I have developed and taught several courses in linguistics for both graduate and undergraduate students, including specialized courses in English as a Lingua Franca, sociolinguistics, pragmatics among others. I am actively involved in graduate and postgraduate supervision and currently have three PhD students I co-supervise.

I am constantly intrigued by the psychological transition PhD students go through, from being in a position where they are instructed on existing knowledge to being in a position where they join the knowledge construction practices their research communities, creating new knowledge in their topics. I have taken an active role in the Research School (Faculty of Humanities) for doctoral students as a teacher and have taught 'Academic Writing for International Publication' and 'Open Science' a number of times, the latter with specialist colleagues from the Research Data Management (RDM). 

Since 2005, I have been doing research on the use of English as the medium of instruction in Swedish higher education and the use of English as an academic lingua franca.

My general research interests include the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in academic settings, spoken academic discourse in general, English-medium instruction (EMI), language policy, linguistic equality, and language change. My research on ELF focused first on the morphosyntactic description of ELF usage from a international Higher Education setting based on communicative effectiveness, followed by various pragmatic aspects of English as a lingua franca in polyadic lingua franca speech in student-student and student-tutor interaction. The policy implications of my work on ELF and EMI led me to the field of Language Policy. I have carried out several studies on language policy work at Swedish universities, focusing on actual language practices vs language management and planning issues, as well as attitudes towards the use of English as manifested in language policy documents in Swedish higher education.

My more recent publications have focused on the under-researched spoken genre of PhD supervisor-PhD student interactions in supervision meetings, investigating various interactional phenomena, e.g. the expression of disagreement in academic talk, as well as PhD students' knowledge construction practices as negotiated in academic talk. I am currently investigating interactional efforts by PhD students and supervisors in synchronous online supervision, including how co-presence is achieved and how epistemic status is signalled to facilitate understanding during the instructional episodes.